Mysterious Journey II (aka Schizm II)

Mysterious
Journey II, by Detalion, is the sequel to
Schizm: Mysterious Journey. Schizm was less than
spectacular, with a weak and confusing plot, terrible under-clued
puzzles, and a few serious interface and design problems. Mysterious
Journey II is much better than its predecessor on the whole, but it
has its own quirks and is definitely, uh, unique among adventure
games.

Unlike Schizm, MJ2 has a coherent and comprehensible
plot. It's not necessarily imaginative, exhausting the list of
clichés for the genre: The hero Sen wakes up with amnesia and
is forced to explore some nearly entirely abandoned places torn apart
by polarized sects still fighting an age-old battle; one group
clinging entirely to technology, the other trusting only in
magic—I mean nature—well, it's both. To be fair, there are
a few unexpected plot twists along the way, but the final deus ex
machina ending was far too contrived to be satisfying.

It is set on the
same world as Schizm, but only the sight of some familiar
floating sea castles confirms that. I'm still not entirely sure
whether MJ2 is set before or after the adventure in
Schizm. So, it's not necessary to play Schizm first,
and it won't help one bit, either.

MJ2 has several non-player characters. The game deals with
them and the complexities of convincing interactive conversation in
the simplest and most common way: it only lets NPCs appear in
cutscenes. After that, Sen is sent off to go explore somewhere alone
again. That's probably a good thing, because the voice acting is of
low quality. Sen himself sounds believable enough, but a few other
characters read from their scripts in monotone.

That leaves the really different part about MJ2: the
puzzles. There wasn't much variety to them, since at least half were
of the sort where you first figure out what all the controls on some
contraption do and then deduce how to use them to reach the solution
state. It seemed a bit strange to encounter such things even in the
world of the naturalist-magicians. One puzzle I just have to mention
is a maze in which you have to draw out your path on paper, then walk
it without being able to see it any more. If you misstep, you fall
and have to start over. It screams for a nomination for Most Annoying
IF Puzzle (Maze division), but at least the desginers provided several
visual and audio cues by which you can orient yourself, and you
can save the game partway through the maze. Luckily, that maze
was the worst puzzle by far. Most puzzles are at least fair, and I
only had the feeling that something was slightly under-clued a few
times.

What surprised me about MJ2's puzzles is how much math they
involve. I'm a mathematician, so I enjoyed figuring out some of the
more complicated interacting gizmos. But if you're not comfortable
doing arithmetic in non-decimal bases or converting between different
bases or solving a set of three simultaneous equations mod 16 with
three unknowns, some of the puzzles might be frustrating. It's not
uncommon to find nice math hiding underneath good puzzles, but usually
IF games don't require working math problems out on paper. I like to
think I could explain Riven's numbering system without
explaining generalized digits and bases, but it would be difficult to
explain my solutions to some of MJ2's puzzles to a
non-mathematician.

The game play as a whole was extremely segmented and linear.
Hardly any of the puzzles integrate convincingly into the world. Most
are supposed to be security systems of some sort, but either could be
figured out by anyone with enough time on their hands (as the player
proves) or the code is constructed from knowledge everyone who lives
in that world would know. I only recall one, maybe two times when two
puzzles were available simultaneously. Linearity is blatantly enforced
by doors and portals that shut behind you and objects that aren't
active until it's time to solve that puzzle. (Even so, I managed to
wander off somewhere I wasn't supposed to once, and got the game into
an unwinnable state.) It's always fairly obvious what to do next, but
at the price of heavy-handed control over the player. Essentially,
the game reduces to one brainbusting puzzle after the next.

I'm afraid I have some gripes about the technical appearance and
feel of the game. Like realMyst, it's a first-person game that
allows you to move continuously through a scene as well as pan the
view left, right, up, and down. That's a very difficult task for all
but the very best modern video cards. I actually played on a computer
without a "transform-and-lighting" video card, which is technically
required. MJ2 was still playable, but the Settings screen in
the menu always crashed the program, the cutscenes were terribly slow
and out of sync, walls would occasionally flicker in and out of view,
and in some locations trying to move around became much slower. At
the worst, an elevator got stuck mid-shaft (but I was able to keep it
inching upward by repeatedly pressing the space bar). I can't
guarantee anybody else trying the game without minimum specs will be
as lucky, so if you buy this game, make sure you have either a video
card with T&L or a vendor who's willing to accept a returned open
box.

That much freedom in movement isn't really necessary in a graphical
IF game anyway, although producers seem to think that the more money
spent on the engine, the better the game will sell. Continuous motion
always seems to cause interface problems, but as long as the views
from adjacent locations overlap enough, it will feel like a real
world. In MJ2 I had to stand ridiculously close to most
objects to click on them, a problem that doesn't come up with the
simpler game engines.

Speaking of hotspots, I really have to commend the designers for
adding a radar-like indicator that lets you know when a hotspot is
nearby and in which direction. It might be unrealistic, but there's
nothing worse in playing graphical IF than searching painfully for the
exact spot to click or failing to realize that something is
interactive. The radar did give a few false alarms on hotspots far
above or below me, and at one point I got frustrated for about a
minute searching for a hotspot that was on the radar but not yet
clickable.

The save game interface entirely ignores the possibility of more
than one person playing the game on the same computer. You can name
your games anything you want in order to distinguish them, but only
when you manually save—it also automatically saves whenever you
accomplish something important, and since you can't overwrite or
delete saved games, you'd easily get your list buried in a pile of
autosaves. Even as a different user on Windows XP, the saved games
are the same; I had to delete a subdirectory of games from a previous
player and change some folder permissions before I could really start
playing.

My conclusion: If you like challenging mathematical and logical
puzzles for their own sake, this game could be worth a try. If not,
you should probably give it a pass. I'd recommend Mysterious
Journey II to certain people I know enjoy that sort of thing, but
not to everybody, and not as a favorite or must-play.